Are you a football fan? Did your national team qualify for the World Cup? If your country is not among the top performers in the PISA test, you are more likely to win the World Cup. Among the 10 top performers, only four made it to Brazil (South Korea, Japan, Switzerland and the Netherlands) and only two qualified for the second round (Switzerland and the Netherlands). (more…)
The PISA results released last week (see my last entry) tell us about the urgent need to transform our education systems in most European countries.
We must now decide whether this much needed innovation can be brought about from inside the system, or if it must be the result of a “disruptive” process led by committed individuals and “education entrepreneurs” from all over Europe.
My conviction is that education practitioners, technology geeks and web entrepreneurs will be determinant to change. They have the ability and willingness to invent tools, content and devices that will benefit learners and trainers, alongside students and teachers. For the first time, technology seems robust and user-friendly enough to enable real innovation in the classroom.
But what kind of innovations are desirable, and for what kind of learning?
For those who travel in Europe on a weekly basis, the publication of the OECD PISA results just confirmed the heterogeneity of European education systems. This is what you could have read in the press while crossing Member States borders: that Swiss students are the best in Europe at maths; German students have improved their maths scores once again; Italian students have improved in maths; and that Spanish students keep falling short in maths. A more in-depth reading would also have told us that Finland has fallen from the podium, Sweden had entered a period of turmoil… The only certainty we can take from last week is that Singaporean students again emerge world beaters in international assessment.